A month before I started my freshman year of high school, my father was killed in a cycling accident. Overnight my mother became a single parent and our sole breadwinner. She was forced to work twelve-hour days to maintain our standard of living and consequently I was often alone in an empty house.

Like most teenagers, I rebelled. With the loss of my father came a profound loss of discipline in my life. Combined with the sudden absence of my mother who was now compelled to work long hours, the tragedy had an important tertiary effect: I stopped attending classes. Eventually, to the distress of my mother, I left high school, opting to take the G.E.D. instead. College was the last thing on my mind, because college was for savvy, affluent students who studied for SATs and graduated on a normal schedule. It wasn’t for people like me.

At 17, I would have been the ideal candidate for an ‘absentee father’ case study: misguided anger, unabashed recklessness, unclear identity. I sought challenges but had no purpose. Luckily (or unluckily) for me there was a war.

I was an Army recruiter’s dream. With my mother’s anxious signature, I was in.

Throughout most of my seven years in the military I gave little thought to the outside world. When provided the discipline, direction, and the brutish encouragement of male authority figures, I began to excel, rapidly advancing through the ranks. I was given ever-greater responsibility — making sergeant in two years. After my first three-year contract expired I enthusiastically re-enlisted for another four.

One of our missions was to facilitate the opening of schools in Kunduz Province. That April, in an effort to intimidate girls from attending, the Taliban attacked the schools with poison gas. It didn’t work. The girls continued to walk to class despite the threat.

As a teenager, I had taken for granted the opportunity to have an education not because an armed insurgency prevented me, but because of my own ambivalence. In Afghanistan, a country plagued with incessant violence, the decision to go to school was often one of life or death. For me, it was a luxury I had wasted. And I regretted it.

A switch had been flipped. For the rest of my deployment nothing could satisfy my thirst for knowledge. I began ordering books online and borrowing from fellow soldiers: politics, literature, science, mathematics — anything and everything. The inevitable downtime that accompanies the soldier’s profession proved ideal for reading. As my squad hovered around a laptop watching bootleg copies of “The Jersey Shore,” I found myself reducing fractions, reading Steinbeck and keeping up on the midterm congressional elections.

One night after a long political conversation with my company commander, he looked at me meaningfully and asked, “Why don’t you go to college?”

Hearing those words out loud was the catalyst I needed. Though the Army had been my home for seven years, and these men were my family, I had been quietly realizing that the path I was seeking was not one I could find in the military.

A year later, I was out. I moved to Chicago and enrolled in a local community college.

I walked into my first class convinced that what felt so inconceivable as a teenager would now be a breeze. I had matured in the military, instilled with discipline, commitment and leadership skills. I’d be the exemplary student. After all, I used to get shot at for a living. How hard could it be?

Turns out, really hard.

I had spent months preparing for the academic rigor, but what I could not have anticipated was the challenge of reintegrating into society. I never expected college to be more stressful than combat. But it was, only different: almost entirely self-inflicted. I was consumed by the fear that no matter what I did, I would never be able to relate to my classmates. I was older, had fought in two wars and been exposed to death. What could we possibly have in common?

I bore scores of prejudices from the military to my civilian life. They were part of my identity, making it impossible to connect with anyone, impossible to make friends, impossible to reintegrate.

It was difficult to adjust to the loss of camaraderie and trust that I took for granted in the military. The culture of an infantry platoon resembles that of a tribe, into which one is indoctrinated only by the mystery of violence and death. Outsiders uninitiated into this mystery are regarded with suspicion. In combat, I knew whom I could trust — the members of my tribe. For years I trained, ate, slept and fought with the same men. It forged an incredible bond and a sense of safety. Paradoxically, I felt more secure in Iraq and Afghanistan than anywhere else.

In an effort to find solace I joined my university’s Student Veterans of America chapter where I found a community of people who had gone through similar situations. I joined a writing group for veterans where I could put painful memories into a narrative that I could control. As productive as this was, however, I was still segregating myself from my civilian peers. That I still regarded them as “civilians” told how much I still viewed myself as an outsider. I had formed nearly no relationships with my fellow non-veteran classmates.

I hated the questions I feared they would ask: “So, why did you join the military?” To me, this was a ridiculous query. There was a war. Why didn’t you join?

I became more resentful, withdrawn. In terms of distance from my classmates, I felt as if I was from Mars.

My animosity turned into untenable opinions. Those who didn’t serve became “selfish” or “cowards,” unworthy of my respect. I thought: “Who were they to think they had something better to do while those, like me, were fighting and dying on their behalf.”

Then, my sophomore year, I met a girl in biology class who had been battling leukemia almost her entire life — and was now studying oncology nursing. Having spent most of her life inside a hospital, she wanted to provide comfort and empathy to others afflicted with the same disease. She didn’t seem to bear any resentment or animosity. I came to view her bravery with admiration. I wasn’t the only one who’d suffered.

Once again, like in Afghanistan, I felt ashamed of my actions. I realized that it was only my own self-prescribed prejudices that were holding me back. When I accepted others for who they were, when I began listening to their stories, I learned that everyone fights their own wars. Making friends became easier. As it turns out, reintegration is a two-way street.

After spending a year at that community college in suburban Chicago, I transferred as a junior to the American University of Paris. I’m now finishing my last semester there and, like most soon-to-be graduates, I find myself thoroughly occupied. I petition companies for unpaid internships, procrastinate on my thesis and remain in a constant state of near-panic at the prospect of moving back in with my mother.

I know that I made the right decision; the benefits of a four-year degree are backed by indisputable empirical evidence. But there’s more to college than just increasing the chances of professional success. The four years have also represented a long and important process by which I’ve re-entered civilian life. It was a place where my intellectual hunger could feast, and most importantly — I found my passion.

Sadly, too many of my fellow veterans are not taking advantage of this opportunity. Only about half of the eligible veterans use their Post-9/11 G.I. Bill benefits, which cover tuition, living expenses and even books. Moreover, a recent study showed that only half of those who do return to school are graduating – which means only a quarter of eligible veterans are earning college degrees. This golden opportunity is being wasted.

I don’t presume to know all the reasons student veterans decide to leave college, or never enroll in the first place. Some probably found lucrative employment as contractors overseas, or in the oil industry. Many have unique obstacles that “traditional” students typically do not, such as families or physical and mental trauma. But with unemployment rates among veterans aged 18 to 25 at 7 percent (national average is 5.1 percent) the issue is disconcerting.

I’ll spare readers the “If I can do it, anyone can” cliché. But, for many of my fellow veterans college may not just be a place for learning, but also for healing. It was for me.
Ryan Blum was a squad leader with the Army’s 10th Mountain Division, deploying twice to Iraq and once to Afghanistan. He now studies International Affairs at the American University of Paris. He is also a member of Foreign Policy’s Best Defense Council of the Former Enlisted which seeks to inject more of the enlisted perspective into policy discussions. Twitter: @ryanblum1

Wars often produce iconic images that capture the naked truths of the struggle. Five Marines raise the American flag at Iwo Jima. A South Vietnamese general calmly fires a pistol into the head of a suspected Vietcong militant during the Tet offensive. A Huey evacuates Americans from a roof in Saigon in the spring of 1975.

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Lt. Col. Rod Coffey and the insurgent flag his unit captured in Diyala Province, Iraq, in 2008. The same banner would eventually be used by the Islamic State.Credit

One image from our experience in the United States Army during the Iraq war stands out. It is a photograph of our squadron commander, then Lt. Col. Rod Coffey, holding a captured flag. The flag is now the widely known black banner of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL. The photograph was taken by one of Colonel Coffey’s soldiers in March 2008 after American forces completely defeated insurgents in a portion of Diyala Province. Colonel Coffey stands with the flag in his right hand, his trademark cigar dangling in his left and the look of a man resolved to defeat militants whose barbarism today is ever so disturbingly documented by the media.

The flag is not unique to the Islamic State. Variations of the black banner adorned with the declaration of faith known as the shahada are used by other Islamic extremists. However, there is little doubt in our minds that the enemy our unit fought and defeated that winter would eventually become part of the Islamic State. Our unit found the flag near a mass grave site and an insurgent training camp.

Our unit — Third Squadron, Second Stryker Cavalry Regiment — then spent several days assisting Iraqi families in properly burying their dead. This was one of the many actions Colonel Coffey and our unit embraced to build trust with the Iraqis who had previously lived under the tyranny of the militant Islamists. Once sufficiently powerful American forces were in place to allow the people of Iraq to defy the extremists, Colonel Coffey worked closely with the senior sheikhs and political leaders to maintain the peace. He often told his men that the greatest weapon they wielded in the fight was decency.

Like many of his subordinates, Colonel Coffey was on his second deployment to Iraq. He received a Silver Star for his actions in the initial thrust of American forces into Baghdad known as Thunder Run in 2003. The colonel was a rugged man set against a desolate environment but also a cerebral student of military history, the art of counterinsurgency and the writings of Thomas Hardy.

At the time, the black flag was not as iconic a symbol as it has become in the last year with the Islamic State’s successes in Iraq and Syria. However, the capture of that flag was a moment of victory that recalls previous wars in which tangible evidence of an enemy’s defeat was more prevalent. The enemy our unit faced sought to fight the superior Americans asymmetrically with improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.s, snipers and hit-and-run tactics. Earlier in the deployment, Colonel Coffey’s unit was handpicked to clear a neighborhood of Baghdad that The Los Angeles Times called Al Qaeda’s “Alamo” during the end of the surge campaign. We lost six soldiers during that successful operation that served in many ways as a coda to the American military’s surge operations in Baghdad. In Diyala Province our unit would lose six more service members and a faithful Iraqi interpreter after insurgents rigged a house to explode when American soldiers searched it. As Colonel Coffey was a student of military history, the symbolism of capturing his enemy’s colors was gratifying to him and a fitting tribute to his fallen brethren.

Although the Islamic State seeks to portray itself as an impressive military force, the insurgents we faced did not put up much of a fight when met with a well-coordinated offensive. Instead they sought to dissolve into the populace. The barbarity the Islamic State regularly displays is not unfamiliar to American service members who had the unpleasant experience of encountering its antecedent in Iraq. More important, we know from our experience that it can be defeated. The Islamic State’s military successes of the past year should be seen for what they are: fragile and reversible.

Soldiers do not choose their wars. Our grandfathers’ mandate in World War II was clear and just. As we reflect on our war and the friends we lost, images like this help to vindicate our fight. While policy makers debated and then realized that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, hundreds of thousands of service members protected Iraqi civilians against violence and chaos. What was clear back then and even more so today is the inhumanity of groups like the Islamic State and their tendency to cower and flee when faced with an organized force.

When deciding what to do with the captured colors, Colonel Coffey followed an unspoken code of quiet honor and dignity that American soldiers from Valley Forge to Gettysburg to Normandy would easily identify, acknowledge and respect. Instead of mounting the flag in a trophy case behind glass, he presented it to the local Iraqi security forces. This simple gesture served as a symbol of shared sacrifice and a reminder of the threat to Iraqi liberty, a threat that is now being confronted by the Iraqis themselves.

Joe Myers served two tours in Iraq as an Army fire support officer in 2005 and 2007-8. He is currently an analyst with the Department of Veterans Affairs. Tim Hsia served with Joe on both of his deployments. He works at Pocket, and is on the Service to School, or S2S, leadership team. Service to School provides free assistance to veterans applying to higher education institutions.

“Selfless service.” Words that I’ve lived by for most of my life. Words that my brother and sister military veterans know all too well and continue to live by whether in or out of uniform.

In the two years that I worked at Blackwater, I followed this same guiding principle, along with the other contractors I knew, regardless of the mission. Though the daily activities of a State Department contractor are rarely glamorous and are as uneventful as most days on a military deployment, we accomplished our work with much the same commitment that was instilled in us while in the military. Often, those missions involved countless hours in convoys to or from meetings, securing venues while American officials conducted high-level meetings with local authorities, or providing medical evacuations in our helicopters.

Before joining Blackwater, I had found myself back home after a deployment to Iraq and, like many veterans, feeling lost and working a job with friends and co-workers who no longer understood me. After a few months of partying and attempting to readjust to civilian life, my mind wandered and yearned for the same sense of mission I had while on deployment. The desire to serve alongside my brothers in arms again, as well as to have the security of a rifle within arm’s reach, was strong. I wanted to be back in Iraq with soldiers.

I tried to get on another deployment with the Army but nothing was available at the time, so when an opportunity with Blackwater presented itself, I accepted the job, completed mountains of paperwork and waited for a date to attend the qualification course at the company’s training compound in Moyock, N.C.

Dozens of questions flooded my mind: Who would I be working with? How hard would the instructors be? What should I wear? The list goes on. Only the right amount of tactical-casual clothing would make the cut with the cool kids at Blackwater, and no one wants to make a bad impression on the first day of school. One thing was for certain, my NPR T-shirt would not be very popular there.

After dealing with inevitable personal issues resulting from telling family, friends and my girlfriend that I was going back to Iraq voluntarily, I packed up my bags and headed off. What I found when I arrived in Iraq was just what I had been hoping I’d find: a high operational tempo, structure, a team environment and, most importantly, professional soldiers working for Blackwater and the State Department. These contractors cared about their jobs and the mission as much as they cared about supporting each other, and carried out their duties in a manner consistent with the guidance of the State Department.

Were there a few folks who were less than pleasant to work with? Of course; show me a job that doesn’t have some. But I watched my team members go out every day and deal with ever-changing rules of engagement, confusing security scenarios and a quirky, sometimes indecisive State Department that didn’t have a clear idea about how it was going to achieve its goals.

The work was generally satisfying, but at times unsettling because we could be sent home for just about any reason. It was also difficult trying to explain to people what we did for a living. And since we were not part of the military, we were exempt from the health insurance and death benefits for our families that we had while in uniform. We adjusted our lives accordingly.

These weren’t crazy rogue missions, but rather missions given to us by the State Department and Defense Department. Some were more stressful than others, some resulted in our brothers being killed alongside us, but I never witnessed any improprieties. We did our work, in my view, with integrity.

As I sit at home these days and watch the bad news about Iraq’s widening civil war, and about the trial of Blackwater employees charged with shooting wildly into a crowd of Iraqi civilians, killing 17, I hear nothing about the contractors who are protecting the American embassy and its personnel. These often reviled contractors, the ones who protect our interests abroad but are rarely mentioned except when they get in trouble, will almost certainly be among the last people out of Baghdad if the situation deteriorates. Does their work mean less because of their job classification?

Matt Pelak has spent over 15 years in the Army and National Guard, including a deployment to Iraq in 2004, and is currently serving as a team leader in the Maryland National Guard’s Long Range Surveillance Company. As a contractor for the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service, he was deployed to Iraq and Africa. He currently works in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., as a firefighter and paramedic, and is an adjunct faculty member at the National Center for Security and Preparedness at the State University of New York at Albany.

“In the Army there are those who walk the walk, and those who just talk the talk.” My drill sergeant at Fort Knox said this to me more than 30 years ago. What he was implying was that there are jobs for soldiers, and jobs for people who just joined the Army for the college plan or to get some skills training.

I had a couple walking-the-walk jobs when I was a young soldier. But for most of my career, the last 17 years of it, I was a military intelligence guy — a case officer — someone who tried to recruit other people to commit espionage; people think of us as spies not warriors. Probably no one ever joined the Army dreaming of being a case officer. Not walking the walk.

And for half of my career, I was a reservist; people think of us as serving one weekend a month and two weeks during the summer. Not walking the walk. While I was in the reserve my civilian job was as a Foreign Service officer. Certainly not walking the walk.

In many cases, my not-walking-the-walk job consisted of going to far away places in the midst of an uprising or insurgency; coming to understand the situation, the parties, their grievances and wants; then writing home about what I had learned. I wrote crisp dry accounts of messy horrible acts of cruelty on long deployments in places like Rwanda, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Sudan — places I thought of as existing along the ragged edge of what my friends and family at home might consider the civilized world.

But writing those crisp dry accounts was not enough for me. Fifteen years ago, in another century, I sat down at a small desk in a rented house in Pristina, Kosovo, and wrote these words, “Yellow. Their skin was yellow.”

Writing my essay, “Yellow,” was my attempt to write the remainders, the things I remembered about the war that did not make it into the official government record. I wrote about the look on an old man’s face as he sat, wounded, in an airless room surrounded by women and children who had also been wounded in a Serbian mortar attack on their village. I wrote about being unsure whether a burned body found in a locked building was that of a child or of a dog. I wrote about a Serb thug holding his pistol against my temple while he yelled how he was going to rape my interpreter and then kill us both.

I didn’t know it at the time, but what I was really writing about was how I developed PTSD. It actually took me several years to figure that out. Years during which I continued to deploy to war zones, weakening myself and feeding the PTSD. A few years after I wrote “Yellow,” I drove out into the desert with a pistol and a couple of beers ready to kill myself.

Luckily, I was interrupted. I came home and got medical treatment. Some of which worked and some of which did not really help. Writing seemed to help, so I kept at it. In time, I had a book. It’s called “Seriously Not All Right: Five Wars in Ten Years.”

A couple of weeks ago, one of the editors of “At War,” asked me to write something about the book, why I wrote it, and what I learned from the process.

Why I wrote the book is simple: I wrote it because that is how I got control of my life and overcame the traumatic memories of five wars in ten years.

Why I published it is a better story, though. While I was writing about the lives I saw destroyed in five wars over 10 years, I looked a little closer to home and started writing about the stigma in the military and in the civilian world, too, of asking for help for PTSD. I wrote about how ridiculous it is that we compartmentalize mental health care from other health care—it is all just health care, after all.

But I was just talking the talk and that is not good enough. It’s analogous to slapping one of those “I support the troops” yellow ribbon magnets on my SUV while I’m on my way to the mall. If I was going to complain so bitterly about the stigma of asking for help, and do so with any authority or integrity, I had to say it out loud. I had to walk the walk.

So I went public with my story. I admitted I had PTSD. I admitted I had come close to suicide. I did so in the hope that someone else might feel safe to do the same.

Once I had come out, I was surprised that most people just sort of shrugged and moved on. A few close friends and colleagues said, “Oh, I never knew.” But in general, there was no trauma about coming out. I don’t really know what all I had expected, but I expected something different. I kind of thought I might get a human stain like that mark on Gorbachev’s head. Maybe I’d be forced to wear a big “L” for loony on my jacket. But no, not so much.

I’ve been out on book tour for a few weeks, off and on, reading and taking questions, sitting for interviews, answering lots of emailed interview questions. My publisher and publicist decided to spread out the tour over a period of months. They were doing me a favor. I can’t tell this story every day for days on end. It’s still hard to talk about taking a pistol in my hand out in the desert ready to kill myself. But every time I tell it I hope someone listening grows a little stronger, a little more willing to stand up and ask for help. Every time they do, they are walking the walk.

Ron Capps is the founder and director of the Veterans Writing Project, a nonprofit that provides no-cost writing workshops for veterans and their families. He served for 25 years in the Army and Army Reserve and is a retired Foreign Service officer. Mr. Capp’s memoir, “Seriously Not All Right: Five Wars in Ten Years,” was published in May 2014 by Schaffner Press.

The music of the brass and drum section set the cadence for the midshipmen marching into the hall, turning sharp corners and snapping to attention in front of the distinguished guests, faculty and veterans eager to celebrate the return of the Naval Reserve Ofﬁcers’ Training Corps to Columbia University after an absence of more than 40 years.

The president of Columbia, Lee C. Bollinger, stood beside retired Rear Adm. James Lowe, class of 1951, and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Juan Garcia III in a ceremony that, according to Mr. Bollinger, ofﬁcially “healed the breech” between the university and the military that developed during the Vietnam War and continued until the university senate voted in April 2011 to allow the Naval ROTC program’s return.

But only 50 blocks downtown, at the Macaulay Honors College of the City University of New York, an attempt to integrate the military with academia has been met with heated resistance.

David Petraeus, the retired general hired as an adjunct instructor last year, faced a small but vitriolic group of students who confronted him in the street on the way to his first class. They called him a “war criminal” and protested his appointment to the university. The group has since organized and gained support from other students and faculty under the name the “Ad Hoc Committee Against the Militarization of CUNY.”

The markedly different scenes, which played out late last year, exemplify the tension between American universities and the military, particularly during a time of transition for the armed forces. As the military downsizes and returns to pre-war force levels or below, many of those leaving the service will take advantage of the post-9/11 GI Bill to obtain a university education. At the same time, senior military leaders of the last decade are seeking post-retirement opportunities, with some turning to universities to take positions as lecturers.

Historically, the relationship between universities and the military has been complicated, though it wasn’t always so tense. During both World Wars, universities commissioned thousands of new ofﬁcers to serve in all branches of the armed forces. At the forefront of this effort was, perhaps surprisingly, the Ivy League.

But public opposition to the war in Vietnam brought a wave of anti-military sentiment that never subsided within traditionally liberal universities. Under increased pressure from anti-war activists on college campuses, as well as stricter academic conditions imposed by university administrations, the military terminated 88 ROTC programs across the country in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including in ﬁve of the eight Ivy League schools. By the early 1990s, academia’s disapproval of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy created a new barrier to military presence at universities until it was repealed in 2011. In effect, for whatever reason they had at a given time, many of the nation’s elite schools closed their doors to the military as a national institution and kept them locked for more than 40 years.

In their book, Arms and the University, scholars Donald Downs and Ilia Murtazashvili present rational arguments for why an increased military presence on university campuses beneﬁts both sides, particularly in the form of ROTC programs. But universities since Vietnam have pushed back, and although, the authors write, they “pride themselves on being liberally minded and open to challenging ideas, this pride seems less merited when it comes to the military, even though the military is one of the most important institutions in American society.”

The case of CUNY and General Petraeus comes at a time when American society has broad respect for the military, but a limited understanding. Other retired high-proﬁle ofﬁcers have taken positions as university lecturers without incident, including Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal at Yale, Adm. Mike Mullen at Princeton, Adm. Eric T. Olson at Columbia and Gen. James Mattis at Dartmouth. A handful of others are full professors, such as retired colonels Peter Mansoor at Ohio State and Andrew Bacevich at Boston University.

The notion that the presence of General Petraeus and other former ofﬁcers is somehow an attempt by “the U.S. government and the CUNY administration to turn the university into an infamous ‘war college,’ ” as the student group’s ofﬁcial statement declared, seems overstated. If anything, exposure to the military through faculty, student veterans and ROTC programs is the best way for universities to play a part in bridging the civilian-military divide. Shutting the military out of these institutions only creates a separate class of citizens who volunteer to serve their country but have limited interaction with the very people they are charged with defending.

To their credit, the CUNY administration upheld the university tradition of the “reasoned expression of dissent” despite pressure to do otherwise. The interim chancellor, William P. Kelly, released a statement in support of General Petraeus’s appointment, citing that “foreclosing the right of a faculty member to teach and the opportunity of students to learn is antithetical to that tradition, corrosive of the values at the heart of the academic enterprise. We defend free speech and we reject the disruption of the free exchange of ideas.”

Back at Columbia, after the ofﬁcial ROTC ceremony ended, a group of civilians, veterans and service members mingled on the veranda to the background music of a Navy jazz ensemble. A few of the new midshipmen, several of whom are in their ﬁrst semester of college, had to leave the reception early to get to their next class. As they crossed under the bridge near 118th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, a few students walking in the opposite direction stopped to take a longer look at their fellow classmates wearing white Navy dress uniforms. They stared curiously, and then continued walking. Maybe next time they’ll say hello.

David Eisler is the program manager for Words After War, a literary nonprofit based in New York City. He is also a graduate student in international affairs at Columbia University. Previously, he served as a captain in the United States Army.

Neil Gussman on a training exercise at Baumholder, Germany, in 1977.Credit Eugene Pierce

In January the U.S. military and I celebrated our 42nd anniversary. Sort of. I am one of those modern soldiers with commitment issues. I enlisted in the Air Force Jan. 31, 1972.

My current and final enlistment in the Army National Guard will end May 31, 2015, the month I turn 62. In between, I switched to the Army in 1975, the Army Reserve in 1981, then I took 23 years off between 1984 and 2007 before re-enlisting in the Guard.

To say a lot has changed since I flew to Lackland Air Force Base 41 years ago hardly begins to describe the difference between serving at the end of an unpopular war and serving today.

My military career started with a wicked hangover from pitchers of beer in Boston bars the night before an early flight to San Antonio, Texas. My shoulder-length hair was shorn by a gleeful redneck. My first drill sergeant was what the Air Force called a BB Stacker. His Vietnam War service had been in Thailand loading bombs on B-52s and living off base in a hooch that came with food, laundry, housecleaning and companionship for $50 per month.

This married-with-kids master sergeant loved telling us stories of loading bombs and getting loaded himself. Though I can’t remember that drill sergeant’s name, I thought of him several times during a 90-day military school I attended at Fort Meade, Md., from August to November of last year. The majority of the soldiers in the Army Student Company had just finished basic training. The rest of us shared their training schedule and their leaders.

In 1972, when we marched in formation, we sang songs about killing Viet Cong. We sang songs about the sex and heroism in our future. Most of all we sang about Jody. Marching songs used to be referred to as Jody Calls. Jody is the guy who is back home sleeping with your wife, eating your food, driving your car, emptying your bank account and, in the saddest versions, turning your own dog against you.

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Mr. Gussman on the airfield at Camp Adder, Iraq, in 2009 after a flight to Al Kut.Credit U.S. Army

The songs we sang at Fort Meade during this summer and fall were more thoroughly bowdlerized than Sunday school stories. Cub Scouts could sing these songs in front of their mothers. No sex. No death. No cheating, lying, drinking or drugs. Certainly no songs with refrains like “Jody got your girl and gone” or “Napalm sticks to kids.”

When we ran in formation at Fort Meade, we almost always sang:

When my granny was 91, she did PT just for fun
When my granny was 92, she did PT better than you
. . and so on up to age 97. The song is clean, affirming of 90-year-old women, and mildly insulting to the wheezing 20-year-old struggling to keep in step at a run.

We also sang Airborne running songs:

C-130 rollin’ down the strip,
Airborne Daddy gonna take a little trip
Stand up hook up shuffle to the door,
Jump on out and count to four. . .

The songs we sang at Fort Meade never varied.

In Army tank training in 1975 we sometimes sang the version above and sometimes this:

C-130 rollin’ down the strip,
Blew a tire and the [two-word expletive deleted] flipped. . .

We were really loud on the second line of the verse. This version goes on to insult the Air Force.

When my daughters were in preschool, I taught them some very sanitized marching songs. The girls learned “They Say That in the Army” which is a complaint song about food, coffee and Army life in general. It has many verses such as:

They Say That in the Army the coffee’s mighty fine,
It tastes like muddy water and smells like turpentine. . .

Each of the various verses ends “Gee Mom I wanna go, but they won’t let me go.”

The girls also learned the “Yellow Bird” song:

A yellow bird,
With a yellow bill,
Just landed on,
My window sill,
I lured him in,
With crumbs of bread,
And then I crushed his (Slam left foot to the ground) little head.

The word emphasized with a stomp was not “little” when we sang the song. And just that one word makes a lot of difference.

A decade later my youngest daughter and some of her high school friends saw the movie “Jarhead.” Lisa came home and said with a smile, “Dad, you never told us the real words to those songs.”

Lisa also wanted to know who Jody was. The older guys in the audience were laughing at places she and her friends did not get the joke. I explained Jody. Lisa and her friends went back to the movie now that they had Jody decoded.

Most of the soldiers I marched with at Fort Meade were in their early 20s, around the age of my daughters are now. They had no idea who Jody was and had never sung a marching song laced with sex, violence and words they use every five seconds in the barracks. Those words make for very loud cadence. But we sang no bad words at Fort Meade.

When the Army fights wars without enemies, we have to sing about running, old ladies, jumping out of airplanes, bad food or wanting to visit Mom. Winning hearts and minds may be good policy, but it makes for lousy marching songs.

Sgt. Neil Gussman enlisted in the Air Force in 1972. He first served on a live-fire missile test range in Utah until he was blinded in a test explosion. When he recovered, he re-enlisted in the Army in 1975 serving as a tank commander on active duty and in the reserves until 1984. He re-enlisted in the Pennsylvania Army National Guard in 2007 serving with 28th Combat Aviation Brigade. He deployed to Iraq in 2009-2010 with the 28th CAB and still serves with the unit today. He blogs about life in the Army. He lives with his wife and six children in Lancaster, Pa.

WASHINGTON – In October, the Army chief of staff, Gen. Ray Odierno, said that because of budget cuts, only two of the Army’s 42 combat brigades were ready for battle. In November, he warned members of the Senate Armed Services Committee that if the nation had to fight in the near term, “it is unlikely that the Army would be able to defeat an adversary quickly and decisively.”

Such warnings have become common around Washington in the wake of the deep cuts to the Pentagon budget this year, and the likelihood of another round of reductions next year. Last month, for instance, Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee warned that sequestration and other budget reductions “will bring our military to a force so small that a reassessment of our national security strategy will be required.”

But not everyone subscribes to the dire talk.

Last month, a group of retired senior-ranking officers argued before a packed audience at the Capitol Hill Club that despite the near certainty of shrinking military budgets, there are ways to trim the Defense Department’s spending without leaving the armed forces less-than-ready for combat. Their plan, they contend, could reduce the overall size of the military while actually increasing its combat power. And in doing so, it will support Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel’s call to revamp the military so that it remains sufficiently strong “under a cloud of budget restraints and uncertainty.”

Under the auspices of the Mitchell Institute, a nonprofit policy group founded by the Air Force Association, representatives of the Army, Air Force, and Navy presented a reorganization plan called the Macgregor Transformation Model. The plan is named after its architect, Douglas Macgregor, a retired Army colonel who is the author of several books on reorganizing the military and also a decorated combat veteran. Mr. Macgregor says his plan can produce an increase in combat capability, even with smaller budgets.

In an August essay in The National Interest, two retired officers, Adm. Mark Fitzgerald and Lt. Gen. David Deptula, along with a West Point history professor, Col. Gian Gentile, described the Macgregor Transformation Model as “a comprehensive Department of Defense-wide reform plan.” The core of that plan, they said, would be reorganizing the Army and Marines combat forces into “plug-and-play” modules — that is, battle groups capable of deploying immediately for just about any contingency, without support units. The authors said that the plan had been recently updated to account for the president’s 2012 decision to focus more resources on Asia, as well as to the reality of reduced federal budgets. The model, they concluded, “enables the Army in particular to reduce its overall size yet increase its combat power and strategic flexibility.”

At last month’s Capitol Hill Club event, Mr. Macgregor said those deployable units, which he called “Combat Groups,” would replace the current brigade-centric system of organizing forces now. Combat Groups would include the major elements of fighting forces — maneuver, strike, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and sustainment units – making them self-sustaining forces that could still, as he put it, “punch above their weight.”

Mr. Macgregor also calls for shedding unnecessary or redundant personnel, reducing the layers of command while increasing the percentage of formations dedicated to war-fighting. He would, for instance, eliminate two-star division headquarters (whose function would be assumed by a smaller number of three-star Joint Task Force headquarters), reduce Combatant Commands to five from the current seven, and consolidate three different four-star headquarters (Training and Doctrine Command; Forces Command; and Army Materiel Command) into two three-star headquarters. The plan would also have a slightly smaller institutional Army than the one we have now by converting selected nondeploying positions from uniform to civilian jobs. All of these changes would be aimed at shortening the “tail” that supports the fighting force, while growing the “teeth.”

As a result, the plan’s supporters say, even at reduced budget levels, the Army would be able to field a greater number of combat battalions than it fielded in 2010, before reductions began. They estimated that even with 150,000 fewer troops, the reorganized Army could field an armored force containing almost 500 more tanks than during its peak year of 2010. A similar gain was projected for artillery, infantry, aviation and engineer units. All told, they say, the Army could reduce its current size of approximately 551,000 troops to as low as 420,000 without losing effectiveness. And more of those troops, they say, will be ready for deployment than is currently the case.

In his opening remarks at last month’s session, General Deptula, who is dean of the Mitchell Institute, said the Defense Department’s force structure had existed in its current form since 1942. “The time has arrived,” he said, “to reform and reorganize the Department of Defense toward joint operations in both word and deed. When a single service attempts to achieve war-fighting independence instead of embracing interdependence, jointness unravels and war-fighting effectiveness is reduced.”

Of course, a change as significant as the Macgregor model is likely to have its share of detractors both in the Pentagon and Congress. So far, the Pentagon seems to be silent on the plan. But two people in the audience at the Mitchell Institute event, one a liberal, the other a conservative, told me the ideas in the model are gaining traction among congressional staffers from both parties, spurred by the likelihood of new spending cuts.

“National defense isn’t a partisan issue,” said one. “It is an American issue.”

Daniel L. Davis is an active duty lieutenant colonel in the United States Army, stationed in the Washington, D.C. region. He has deployed into combat zones four times, and was awarded the Bronze Star for valor during Desert Storm and a Bronze Star in Afghanistan.
The views in this article are those of the author alone and do not represent the views of the Department of the Army or Department of Defense.

The chaos of battle swirled all around us. As the soldiers advanced, an explosion severed a chunk of the rock face with a thunderous crack. “Children! What are you doing in there?” yelled Mom. It was too late. In my eagerness to augment the sounds of war, I had lifted one end of the marble coffee table and dropped it to the floor. Mom burst into the living room and fixed her eyes on the damage. My sister Kate and I gulped and looked at our valiant comrades. There were four bears, three rabbits, six mice, one tiger and five dogs. Mom was not amused. Now we were in serious danger.

Like my stuffed-animal war games, Hanukkah offered a similarly martial escapism. As a boy, I felt slight and unpopular around my peers, and compensated by wearing a He-Man costume underneath my regular clothes at school while dreaming of heroic enterprises. Hanukkah tells of King Antiochus IV and his Assyrian Greek armies, descendants of Alexander the Great, who conquered the Land of Israel in 168 B.C., defiling the Temple in Jerusalem and oppressing the Jewish inhabitants. A small but determined resistance, led by Judah Maccabee, rose up to defeat the invaders, recapture the Temple and sanctify it again by rekindling its holy lamps with a tiny amount of sacred oil that miraculously lasted for eight days. The narrative was easily adapted to the bullies and heroes in the social life of an awkward preteenager. Whether waged by Hasmoneans in Judea or stuffed animals in our living room, war seemed a successful (and thrilling) means of righting political, religious and social wrongs.

My childhood understanding of war was not entirely incorrect, but it lacked a key concept that would reveal itself in time. In 2007, my mom and I once again found ourselves together on a battlefield, although in this instance the circumstances were peaceful and the location was Fredericksburg, Va., on a tour of Civil War sites. Standing atop Marye’s Heights, I looked out over the town where 12,000 Union soldiers marched to their death as the Confederates decimated them from my elevated position. “It is well that war is so terrible,” Gen. Robert E. Lee had remarked, as he surveyed the carnage. “Otherwise, we would grow too fond of it.”

The aspect of war that I had been missing, of course, was its terribleness, and consequently, any understanding of the dedication required to wage it. Dedication, as it turns out, lies at the very core of the meaning of Hanukkah — its name refers to the rededication of the Temple — but any appreciation of that during childhood was buried beneath the mountains of gifts we opened and latkes we ate. I never fully appreciated the connection until I studied the tale of Hannah, a lesser-known hero of the holiday’s lore, while serving in Afghanistan and Kuwait as an Army chaplain in 2012.

Antiochus sought to Hellenize his Jewish subjects, and commanded Hannah and her seven sons to publicly renounce their religion. After the first six refused to yield and were torturously murdered, the king exhorted Hannah to persuade her last remaining son to live as a Greek, rather than die as a Jew. Instead, she proved as steadfast as her offspring. “Fear not this tormentor,” she directed her son, and “take thy death that I may receive thee again in mercy with thy brethren.”

Hannah’s dedication secured her a place of honor in Rabbinic tradition. But religious zeal, war and martyrdom, as exemplified in her inspiring and seductive legacy, have vexed Jewish thinkers throughout the centuries. Upon graduating from Yale in 2004, I sought to discover the answers for myself and shocked my family and friends by moving to Israel and enlisting in the Israel Defense Forces. My unit’s graduation from infantry school was held on Masada, the mountain fortress overlooking the Dead Sea where ancient Jewish families committed mass suicide rather than submit to Roman rule.

On a tour of the ruins, our military education instructor spoke to the complexity of this story. “We used to bring soldiers here to show them an ideal,” she explained. “Now we bring them to ask questions.” It wasn’t hard to see why. Stories of Hannah’s sons and Masada rebels uncomfortably reminded me of an interview I read with a Palestinian leader behind the rocket attacks from Gaza. “We’re not afraid of martyrdom,” Abu Hussein said. “We’re happy to sacrifice our families to win this battle.”

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David Frommer leading a Jewish worship service for U.S. personnel in Kuwait, 2012.Credit David Frommer

Having progressed from my days as commander in chief of my teddy bears to serve in both the I.D.F. and the United States Army, the only thing I know for certain is that endangering your life for the benefit of millions of people you’ve never met is one of the most confusing things you can do. I joined the Israeli military as a combat soldier because I personally wanted to stop Abu Hussein’s rockets, and I joined the United States Army as a noncombatant chaplain because of Hannah’s implication that we must share our brothers’ suffering. I am proud to have dedicated myself to this service because of the sacrifice it involved and the benefits I believe it reaped for others.

I am also aware, however, that war elicits such dedication from all of us in exchange for opiates like self-importance, false clarity and groupthink. Any honest assessment of war (and, by extension, martyrdom) struggles to determine whether it represents an ennobling dedication or an unhealthy one. War is the ultimate Gordian knot — terrible when we’re not sure what we’re doing, and equally terrible when we know exactly what we’re doing. We continue to hack away at it just as Alexander did, but we’re no closer to untangling it than he was. Yet, had Judah and Hannah not violently defied Antiochus, had parents not sacrificed their children to purge the United States of slavery, or to rid Europe of Nazism, the world would indeed be a far darker place than it is today. I still love the holiday of Hanukkah, but more as a cautionary tale than a triumphant commemoration. As for war, the more I study its mysteries as an adult, the more I think I understood it better as a child.
David Frommer, a captain in the Army National Guard, received his commission in 2008 while studying for the cantorate at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York City. He deployed to Afghanistan and Kuwait in 2012, and now lives in San Francisco, where he serves as a battalion chaplain in the California Army National Guard and as cantor at Congregation Shomrei Torah in Santa Rosa, Calif.

Standing shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of heavily armed paratroopers, I looked around at all of us, breathing heavily, angry and resentful, surrounding the Baya mosque in Baghdad. The previous morning, we had arrested the head imam because he was stockpiling weapons in the mosque. Now, under amber street lamps casting wicked shadows, his followers were gathered, demanding his release. My adrenaline was still pumping from the explosion minutes earlier, when one of them tossed a grenade at our line of troops, injuring more than a half-dozen soldiers and civilians. After that, order descended into a running street battle, soldiers wrestling protesters, bodies slamming into the hard concrete. Months of pent-up aggression were suddenly released in a cathartic, chaotic performance.

After that initial fit of violence, things were calming down. We had them surrounded, cornered, their backs to the mosque. Sweat ran down from under my helmet and into my eyes as I struggled to make out the mass of bodies in front of me, searching for a gleam of metal, the shine of a worn-out AK-47. They chanted at us: “America equals Saddam” and “Down down, U.S.A.!”

Imams with dark beards and large black turbans walked among the protesters, handing out bread and tea as our sergeants trooped the line in front of us, yelling and ensuring that we were packed tight next to one another like a Roman phalanx.

Behind us I could hear the rumble of Humvees and tanks, their guns canted over our heads, seemingly trained toward the dome and minaret of the mosque. Above us two helicopters circled, buzzing low, shining their industrial-strength spotlights on the crowd of protesting Iraqis. Hundreds of troops, tanks, Humvees and helicopters. All of this American firepower, focused on the people and the building in front of us, the mosque.

The situation was tense. One panicky soldier, one itchy trigger finger, and there would be a massacre. I was scared.

Off to my right I saw a squad of American soldiers turn to chase someone into an alley, loudly knocking over some garbage cans and startling us all. I laughed nervously and turned to the soldier next to me and said, “I know we’re not at war with Islam, but if someone took a picture right now. …”

That was Oct. 7, 2003. That was the day that the war ended for me.

I was there for the invasion when it was about finding illicit weapons and taking out Mr. Hussein and going home. I was sure that I would be home in time for burgers and fireworks on the Fourth of July.

The summer passed, and I was still there. Hot, miserable and not understanding what I was doing anymore. The insurgency began. We started getting hit more and more frequently. The looks from Iraqis on the street became darker and darker. I could no longer disarm anyone with a smile.

I’ve told this story a hundred times, refining it and polishing it and punching it up. It’s just as true as any war story ever was. It is the story I think about the most. It’s the thing I think about when I think about where it went wrong, where it ended or where it began to end. After that night, the war was never the same. The cool demeanor I prided myself on before was gone, replaced instead with a semi-panicky hypervigilance. I was a soldier determined to get home.

I cringed a little harder when we drove down the bomb-laden streets. When the platoon leader asked for volunteers, I looked around to see if anyone else would raise his hand first. My eyes flicked nonstop to every window we passed, every rooftop. My default reaction to anything I heard from anyone was distrust.

I was sadder when I called home.

Shortly after the protest, we moved from our small, company-size firebase to a new, megaforward operating base, complete with its own dining facility, dormitories, air-conditioning and showers. It was a welcome and wonderful change of pace from the spartan conditions we had endured since deploying earlier in the year.

The riot at the Baya mosque coupled with the move to the F.O.B. marked the beginning of the end of the war for me. I barely felt it then — just a deep-inside, tingling concern about what we were doing. I didn’t know what it was; I just knew I wanted to go home.

But it was the tipping point. If I were asked to look back and pick a time and place at which losing felt inevitable, at which the population turned from cautious supporters to cynics, that would be it. It was the day that I realized that winning from here on out meant simply not losing.

I’m sure every soldier has a story of where his or her war begins and where it ends. This one is mine.

Don Gomez is an Army officer. You can follow him on Twitter: @dongomezjr.

Since President Obama began weighing the possibility of military strikes against the government of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, many veterans have been discussing the pros and cons of another armed intervention so soon after the Iraq war ended, and at a time when American troops are still engaged in Afghanistan. One theme often heard in that debate is that policy makers in the White House and Congress should listen to the voices of veterans in calculating the cost of another war. With the United Nations expected to debate Syria – and the possibility of resolving the crisis – through diplomacy this week, At War offers two essays by former soldiers, one a veteran of the war in Iraq, below, and one of the war in Afghanistan, on the issue.

This week, the United Nations will be discussing ways to end the civil war in Syria and eliminate President Bashar al-Assad’s stockpile of chemical weapons. The Obama administration’s push for military action seems to have given way, for now at least, to diplomacy. Yet an American military strike against Mr. Assad’s forces remain a real possibility if diplomatic efforts fail. I’m not so sure how I feel about all of this.

One unanticipated effect of my service in Iraq has been the running debate in my head about what justifies our involvement in future conflicts. I’m not naïve enough to ignore the widespread perception that the conflict I served in was an unnecessary mistake – a strategic blunder made by policy makers who expected quick victory, but which instead devolved into a nearly decade-long slog of bloodletting. Sometimes the wars we get involved in are worth the cost, and sometimes they aren’t. Anecdotally, at least, it seems the majority of Americans think that mine wasn’t.

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Dan Savage prepared for a mission in Baghdad in September 2007.Credit Dan Savage

I often agree, and with the heavy heart of a man who has watched other men die, I’m far more hesitant to support military action these days. It wasn’t always this way.

I was eight when President George Bush began Operation Desert Storm, but I probably paid considerably closer attention to what was going on than the average third grader. I quickly learned the difference between an Iraqi Scud missile and the American Patriot batteries that would shoot them down. I thought the F-117 stealth fighter (cutting-edge technology at the time) was the coolest thing I had ever seen. I was far too young to understand the causes of the conflict; it didn’t matter so much to me – I was 8. I thought war was cool.

Ten years later, when it came time to head to college, I chose to go to West Point. I remember proudly answering in the affirmative when, during my high school civics class, one of my classmates asked, “Wait, so if we go to war, you have to go, too?” Little did I know, my bravado would eventually be tested. One sunny Tuesday in September of my plebe (freshman) year, Al Qaeda attacked America, forever changing the future for me and my classmates. The seniors were chomping at the bit to get into the fight, and the younger cadets even worried that they might miss the war altogether. Only a few months later, the drumbeat of another war got louder and louder, eventually leading us toward the invasion of Iraq.

I was proud of NATO’s air war over Kosovo and disappointed when we didn’t intervene in Rwanda. I didn’t care so much about the strength of the intelligence case against Saddam Hussein’s unconventional weapons – I had joined the Army to punish the bad guys and protect the good guys, and on the surface, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq seemed to be doing just that. My fellow cadets and I were tired of the cat-and-mouse game we had seen play out with Mr. Hussein since we were kids. We wanted to go knock off the tyrant. He was a bully to his own people and a menace to the world. It was time to give this jerk what he had coming.

Between the invasion and my own deployment, however, my enthusiasm began to wane. People I knew started dying. My roommate was killed. I had seen videos of the burned corpses of contractors being dragged through the streets of Falluja. This didn’t seem so fun anymore. I had chosen this path, though, and I would do my duty. I signed up for the infantry and volunteered for Airborne and Ranger training, because I couldn’t look at my classmates and ask them to take on that burden while I chose a less dangerous, more comfortable role. My idealism might get me killed, but I wasn’t going to let one of my friends get killed in my stead.

I deployed in 2007 as the leader of a 46-man Stryker infantry platoon. When I first set foot on Baghdad soil, I remembered being 8 years old, watching CNN as the antiaircraft fire rose from the very city in which I stood. My unit was tasked with high-intensity nighttime raids in the heart of Sadr City, the most dangerous district in Baghdad at that time. Getting shot at became a regular occurrence, and politics was the farthest thing from my mind – I simply wanted to do my job well and bring my soldiers home alive. Fate would have it otherwise, and in a tragic episode none of us will ever forget, we lost two of our brothers.

In the months after their deaths, I wondered what we – my unit and my country – had accomplished during our time in the desert. What did my men die for? What in the world could possibly be worth such a sacrifice, or the nine years of my own life that I spent willing to die for America in a conflict which many view in retrospect as a poor idea, myself included?

In the years since, these questions have not faded, and today, I hear the drumbeat sounding again. In my mind, I hear echoes of the past – of my initial position on both Kosovo and Iraq. I hear a case that appeals to my instinct to protect, and I feel a strong desire for our country to crush Mr. Assad with the ferocity with which he has abused his own people. While I appreciate the recent possibility for a diplomatic solution, I remain distrustful of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Mr. Assad, and I’m reminded of the decade of cat-and-mouse we played in the 1990s. Part of me asks, “Why play this game again if we have the power to end it now?”

Then again, will bombing Mr. Assad actually make a difference? If our goal isn’t regime change, are we just doing this to make ourselves feel better about the fact that, until now, we have watched more than 100,000 people be massacred by their own government, and we have done nothing to stop it? And if we did want regime change, we’ve learned that doing so essentially means we own another country for another decade. I think we can all agree not to do that again. Who are we supporting, anyway? Some of the rebel groups – not one of which is strong enough to take control of the country in Mr. Assad’s absence – are allied with Al Qaeda, our darkest enemy whose actions kicked off these past 12 years of war. Do we really want to help them?

Military action never comes without cost. Despite popular perceptions of our military strength, we don’t just get to do whatever we want around the globe. People shoot back. Whether pilots or sailors, our people can be harmed or killed. These decisions fill cemeteries. They tear families apart. Each life matters – it’s not just a statistic, a price tag. It’s someone’s father or mother, son or daughter. Our leaders in Washington don’t always feel it, but for those who serve, it’s our brothers and sisters whose lives are at stake.

I don’t offer answers to these questions, and I don’t envy any president for having to answer them. But as the military-civilian divide in our country grows, I think it’s valuable to understand (and critical to take into account) the experiences of those who have served, especially when deciding whether or not to send more of our finest into harm’s way yet again. As a veteran, I am torn between the idealism which led me to join and the realism I’ve earned in the process, and I’m sure I’m not alone. It’s the burden of being a soldier, I suppose.

Since President Obama began weighing the possibility of military strikes against the government of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, many veterans have been discussing the pros and cons of another armed intervention so soon after the Iraq war ended, and at a time when American troops are still engaged in Afghanistan. One theme often heard in that debate is that policy makers in the White House and Congress should listen to the voices of veterans in calculating the cost of another war. With the United Nations expected to debate Syria — and the possibility of resolving the crisis — through diplomacy this week, At War offers two essays by former soldiers, one a veteran of the war in Iraq, one of the war in Afghanistan, below, on the issue.

In 2010, I was deployed to Afghanistan to provide logistical support for a team of combat troops, but found that part of my job was as a sort of front-line diplomat — an Army officer assigned as my unit’s primary liaison to an Afghan National Army battalion. After many cups of tea, shared meals, small talk and planning of joint missions (facilitated by some fantastic interpreters), I soon gained a great deal of respect for the Afghan officers and noncommissioned officers I worked with. And, although their country is thousands of miles away, much of what I learned from my Afghan colleagues is on my mind as I take in the news and debate about intervening in Syria, as diplomatic efforts to resolve the crisis get underway this week in the United Nations.

Captain Mirwais and I had many cups of tea together, and we even cooked together over the propane burner he kept in a supply closet at his barracks. We talked often, and one day I decided to ask him what it was like in the Afghan army in those tumultuous years after the Soviets left. He was at that time a medical logistics officer, a job he said he was glad not to have anymore. He organized ambulances and medical supplies to support Afghan troops on the front lines of fighting against the mujahideen —many of whom had been the American-backed “freedom fighters” against the Soviet army. (The United States withdrew support after the Soviets departed in 1989.) Captain Mirwais said it was a terrible time, but he had no choice. Every man in Afghanistan, it seemed, was fighting as the country descended into civil war.

A woman he knew, the mother of a teenage boy, begged him to take the boy with him as a medical soldier. “They will kill him if he stays at home,” she said of the approaching mujahideen, and Captain Mirwais reluctantly agreed to take the boy. In the morning, he put the boy in a uniform, and sent him to work driving one of the ambulances. That day saw hours of brutal fighting, overwhelming the ambulances and leaving literally thousands dead on the ground. “We didn’t have enough trucks to take away the dead,” he said. He showed me with his hands how he and his men piled the dead and destroyed bodies onto the backs of what flatbed trucks they had. There were no spare trucks to carry the wounded — and so they had to pile the wounded on top of the dead to carry them away, he said. He looked down at the floor and shrugged his shoulders.

“What happened to the boy in the ambulance?” I asked. Captain Mirwais pulled from his pocket a tin of green snuff, pinched a large dip, and placed it inside his cheek. He paused. “His mother gave him to me in the morning, and by night he was dead. He did not even survive the day,” he said, giving a short, sardonic laugh and shaking his head.

“When the forest is on fire, everything burns.” He laid back onto his pillows against the wall and half closed his eyes as he adjusted the snuff in his cheek.

The fire of civil war raged in Afghanistan for more than a decade between the Soviet pullout and the United States-led invasion in 2001. Some 400,000 Afghans lost their lives as a result of fighting between militia factions and the mujahedin, and later the Taliban, who emerged from the mujahedin and rose to power in the late 1990s. I asked some of the other Afghan officers and noncommissioned officers I worked with what they did during those years. Some had similar stories of fighting in the army, some fled to stifling refugee camps in Iran or Pakistan, others fought in the militias. All had tragic stories of death and loss.

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Kristen L. Rouse was deployed to Afghanistan in 2010 as an Army officer.Credit Kristen Rouse

I struggled to respond. I remembered reading about Afghanistan in the 1990s as I attended college, focused on my immediate needs and my hope for the future, while Afghans were embroiled in a living hell. Little could I have imagined that years later, I would be there, face to face with people who barely survived. “I had no idea how bad it was,” I told Captain Mirwais. “I wish it hadn’t happened like that. I wish someone … I wish we could have done something,” I said, hoping my interpreter could make my statements a little less awkward. But even my interpreter had lived through this horror, too.

The all-consuming flames of civil war are unforgiving, and the damage can never be undone. Lives and livelihoods are destroyed. Cities lie in ruins. Thousands or millions are displaced. Children grow up in refugee camps, incubated in ideologies of hopelessness, rage and retribution. Aid groups and other countries may contribute millions or even billions toward reconstruction — but recent history shows us that the most likely outcome of civil war is more violence.

As we’ve stood by and watched the death toll rise and the atrocities worsen in Syria, I am haunted by the lessons I learned during my three tours in Afghanistan. When everything in a forest burns, no matter the sincerity of the rebuilding efforts, it may take decades or even generations to reverse the cycle of destruction and restore what was lost.

I am thankful that we’re finally debating some form of intervention in Syria. But I worry that America’s discussion is losing sight of the urgent need to quench the raging inferno before it worsens further and spreads to the dry tinder beyond Syria’s borders. My hope is that military strikes are reserved as a dire, last option after all others are exhausted. Humanitarian aid may seem neither aggressive nor decisive, but it spares lives, eases suffering and allows the rebuilding process to begin before all becomes scorched to the ground. And it may prevent violence, terrorism and war in the years to come.

Lately I think often of Captain Mirwais and my other Afghan colleagues, and I feel myself wanting to show them that I’ve taken what they taught me and made a positive impact as a result. I hope Americans can collectively take the lessons we’ve learned from our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and apply them wisely in our future actions abroad. We have to remember, first and foremost, that wars take a profound and lasting human toll. Sparing lives and alleviating suffering can be an effective strategy. Because in the end, the lives we save may be our own.
Kristen L. Rouse, a captain in the Army National Guard, deployed to Afghanistan in 2006-2007, 2010 and 2012. She is a logistics planner with the New York City Office of Emergency Management and also a member of the Truman National Security Project Defense Council. She writes at trueboots.wordpress.com. You can follow her on Twitter. The opinions stated here are her own.

“I’ve done a lot of horrible things in my life,” the author Thomas McGuane once said, “but I never taught creative writing.”

Words to consider, for writing students and teachers alike. Love them or hate them, writing workshops are entrenched in the culture of contemporary writing, be it formally in the halls of academia or informally in living rooms across the country. With increasing frequency, the workshop model has penetrated the veterans community, where a still-rising number of young men and women are returning home with stories to tell and meaning to seek.

But not all writing workshops for veterans are created equal.

Since returning from Iraq in 2009, I’ve attended (and taught) a variety of veteran-centric writing workshops. Some focused on the veteran-as-artist transition. Others were more interested in the cathartic benefits of writing. Some had the institutional support of wealthy donors and involved administrators, while others, well, didn’t. Widely seen as the pre-eminent new writing workshop for veterans, the New York University Veterans Writing Workshop was where I personally found a group and an environment worth coming back to, week after week, to hone my craft with like-minded souls.

There was one common refrain at all these workshops, though: civilians couldn’t attend. To gain entrance as a student, one had to present his veteran credentials at the door.

While perhaps not intentional, this admittance policy reinforced an ugly undercurrent of thought in military writing – that one shouldn’t write about war unless one participated in it as a combatant or otherwise survived its destruction. Constructive criticism offered by civilian instructors was all too often met with a “Well, that’s the way it happened” reply, as if that made up for the lack of character development or cohesive narrative in submitted pieces. Even nonfiction pieces more journalistic in nature than creative require strong writing and heavy reworking – “That’s the way it happened” is best saved for the version told at bars.

For veteran writing workshops to flourish, I found, they needed to stress the writing part over the veteran part, and they needed to focus on improving students’ work over making students feel good about themselves. Like anyone else, battle-hardened Iraq and Afghanistan veterans appreciate positive reinforcement, but in a society with a civilian-military divide as wide as ours, blanket positivity can often come across as condescending. Further, even vets at workshops predominantly for healing purposes sought to improve their work. Sometimes that required a suggestion to pick up classics like Isaac Babel’s “Red Cavalry.” Other times it required a quick lesson on the importance of active verbs. And still other times it required a frank discussion about rising above tired military tropes and clichés, or not including confusing details in order to “stay true to life,” as if writing itself wasn’t already artifice.

Such lessons happened in a dynamic atmosphere with multiple perspectives and worldviews represented – perspectives and worldviews not just veteran, but civilian, too. But unless these veteran workshops came packaged with a confident and vocal instructor, engaged civilian voices weren’t represented. We were lucky to have that at the New York University workshop when I attended it. Such didn’t always happen elsewhere.

Concurrently, I returned to graduate school for a degree in creative writing. During my two years in M.F.A.-Land, I was exposed to civilian voices and views I hadn’t encountered much since my pre-service days. These voices and views proved critical in improving my creative work, even when I ultimately disagreed with their feedback, because they made me consider why I was doing so in a way that transcended the reflexive “They weren’t there, they don’t know what they’re talking about.” It was my duty as a writer to make sure they knew what they were talking about, and if they weren’t getting there after reading a submission about Iraq or about military life, it was because I’d failed them, not the other way around.

I workshopped with Hasidic Jews from Brooklyn and with hipsters from Turkey, while studying under Pulitzer Prize winners and sharp-eyed magazine editors. I learned from all of them, and hope they learned from me too, because of our differences in background, perspectives and approaches to craft, not in spite of them. While some of my experiences at veteran-only workshops were similarly meaningful in these ways, some had not been. What to do then, to more accurately replicate the grad school feel in veteran writing workshops?

Though my experiences are anecdotal, there is wider evidence to suggest veteran-only classrooms are often well-intended missteps. According to “An Ethical Obligation: Promising Practices for Student Veterans in College Writing Classrooms,” a 2013 study of post-9/11 veterans returning to college, written by D. Alexis Hart and Roger Thompson, there are a variety of drawbacks to “veteran-designated classes,” from isolating vet-students from the larger campus culture to the veterans themselves subcategorizing between branches and combat experience. While Hart and Thompson caution that investigating these classes wasn’t the primary focus of their study, their findings do point toward assimilation being a far more useful goal for both the administrators and students.

I finished my M.F.A. coursework in May, spending my summer in coffee shops furiously finishing a war novel that doubled as my thesis. Between bouts with lattes and trite writerly angst, an old friend, Brandon Willitts, approached me about serving as a writing instructor for his new nonprofit, Words After War. I hemmed and hawed until Brandon said he didn’t just want to talk about bridging the civilian-military divide, he wanted to actually do it by bringing interested, smart civilians into the classroom with vet-writers. And why not? If these wars truly are all of society’s and not a separate warrior caste’s, why should veterans be the only ones turning to literature about war and conflict in classrooms and workshops?

Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, especially veteran-writers of Iraq and Afghanistan, love to pontificate about the civilian-military divide – myself included. It is real and it is immense and unfortunately, nothing short of conscription seems likely to eliminate it. That doesn’t mean we stop trying to bridge it, of course, but it’ll take both sides reaching out to do so. If we’re serious about these wars and their aftermaths belonging to the entire American citizenry, it’s our responsibility as vets not to harangue anyone who didn’t go abroad with us. We need to let them speak, too, and let them speak about what the wars looked like from a distance. Their perspective matters just as much as ours does, something the veteran community would be wise to remember if we’re going to be able to effectively affect the future for the better.

That’s what we’re putting in place at Words After War. One didn’t need to have to carry a gun in a foreign land to study and contemplate war and conflict literature. Take Katherine Anne Porter, for example. She never served in combat. But a few paragraphs of her work will show any reasonable mind she understands the terrible depths of conflict and loss.
Here’s the haunting last paragraph of “Pale Horse, Pale Rider”: “No more war, no more plague, only the dazed silence that follows the ceasing of the heavy guns; noiseless houses with the shades drawn, empty streets, the dead cold light of tomorrow. Now there would be time for everything.”

For readers of more contemporary literature, consider Ben Fountain. He wrote the finest Iraq war novel to date, “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,” without having served in the military. Yet the dissociation his characters experience upon returning to American soil is pitch-perfect, and remarkably so – only accomplished because Fountain researched, wrote and rewrote for it to be that way.

We’ll be studying Porter’s stories and Fountain’s novel in our workshop, among many other works, written by vets and civilians alike.

Just as there’s no panacea for bad writing, there’s no panacea for veteran writing workshops. I have no doubt other veteran writing workshops across the country have their own lessons learned, and are establishing their own best practices accordingly. That said, the history of the arts tends to be one of fighting for inclusion, especially to involve talented, driven people. We at Words After War look forward to being a small part of that tradition. I hope some of you can join us in September in Brooklyn.

“U.S. Adds Forces in Persian Gulf, a Signal to Iran.” I surveyed this headline on the New York Times’ Web site in July 2012 with concern. News like this had always felt comfortably remote during my childhood on the Upper East Side and my undergraduate years at Yale, and I had assumed that would continue when I began my studies at Hebrew Union College to join the Jewish clergy.

But I was now a chaplain in the Army National Guard, preparing for Rosh Hashana at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait, and personal and foreign affairs were colliding in unexpected ways. As the first Jewish cantor to serve in military chaplaincy, I knew that my performance would establish important precedents. But five years of cantorial training for the synagogues of Westchester had somehow left me unprepared for the obvious question: What would a United States naval buildup mean for my tashlich worship service in the Persian Gulf?

Why go back? After five years in the Army, with 27 months spent in Iraq and much of the rest in Honolulu, why would Lance Marottek, 25, return to the northeastern Montana town of Poplar, population less than 1,000? On the rough edge of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, with a graduating high school class of just 40 students, it offers the kind of small town life many young men join the military to flee from, never to return.

But, when Mr. Marottek finished his second deployment to Iraq with the 25th Infantry Division in 2011, he said he had figured out that “I can do whatever I want in Montana – hunting, fishing, driving – no one’s going to bother me, no one’s going to stop me. I could never live in a city. Honolulu was almost too much.”

The wanderlust that had motivated him to enlist in 2007 arose after a few boring classes at community college, and a realization that he was falling into a simple extension of high school amid the often dreary emptiness around the reservation. His grandfather, a Korean War veteran, had always suggested military service. He and about a half dozen other students in his small high school class made the same choice, he said.

“I couldn’t imagine my life being if I did the same things I did in high school,” he said. “How many people get to say they lived in Hawaii for a couple years? Or Iraq? I wanted to travel and see some different things.”

Like many veterans with multiple deployments, he remembers one more fondly than the others. While he deployed both times with Alpha Company, First Battalion, 14th Infantry Regiment, his 2007-9 experience was much more rewarding, he said, with the unit aggressively controlling the area around Tarmiyah, a rugged little city north of Baghdad. The men were tightknit, packed into bays filled with bunk beds in a city youth center turned into a joint security station; they found an intense camaraderie in the rough conditions and nonstop missions.

Photo

Pfc. Lance Marrotek during a Sons of Iraq payday in Tarmiyah, June 2008. The Awakening Councils, also known as the Sons of Iraq, were local groups, including former insurgents and Baathists, who turned against the insurgency and received pay, first from the Americans and then from the Iraqis.Credit Nathan Webster

The second deployment, at a joint service station, or American minibase, called McHenry near Hawija in 2010-11, the soldiers were in two-man trailers, with plenty of private space where they could disappear on their own to watch movies and play video games. It wasn’t the same – they lost that tightknit feel. And, with a much less aggressive mission posture, Mr. Marottek felt that they opened themselves up to more attacks. His closest call came when a rocket-propelled grenade penetrated his heavily armored vehicle, called a MRAP.

“It was like a flaming baseball bat slamming against my head,” he said. No Purple Heart from the sprayed shrapnel and no concussion, but “I think I’m always going to have ringing in my ears. That’s just going to be normal. My girlfriend gets annoyed, asking me a question, and I say ‘huh?’”

The Army taught Mr. Marottek to drive MRAPs and Stryker armored vehicles, so his post-military transition to driving backhoes and trucks around the booming North Dakota oil fields was not a difficult one.

Many veterans find it easy to fall into familiar ruts upon returning home. Before the Army, Mr. Marottek had briefly taken classes in operating heavy equipment, but he didn’t want to simply go back to school and get bored like he did before. Someone gave him a number to call, and he hooked on with a four-man company working in the North Dakota oil fields. A year-and-a-half later, the company, Common Denominator, has about 45 men who drive trucks, backhoes and other equipment in the fields of the Bakken oil field about two hours away.

The oil fields provide good work, he says, with 12-hour days paying about three times as much as he earned when he was deployed. It starts as grunt work, but raises and bonuses kick in for the men who last 60 days. With demand for workers so high, he says he’s still surprised when some workers collect a bonus for five straight days on the job – then disappear.

“I don’t understand a lot of poverty,” he said. “The opportunity is there, but only a handful of people want to take it.”

Half-Sioux from a Native American father who was never in his life, Mr. Marottek was raised by his mother’s parents after she passed away when he was 5. While his father’s extended family lives throughout the Reservation, he encounters them only sporadically. His grandfather Pete owned a farm south of town, where Mr. Marottek grew up helping as a farmhand; one regret from Iraq, he said, was not seeing his grandfather for about a year before he died in June 2008. “He’d been smoking, drinking and dipping his entire life. Just what he did.” Mr. Marottek made it to the funeral on emergency leave, “in just 48 hours, I was in Billings, Mont.,” he said. But “there was no time to adjust. I was in a Walmart with no weapon, and none of my guys. It was rough.” His grandmother Marianne still runs the farm today, he said, and “you tell me how many 70-year-old women work three jobs.”

Mr. Marottek recruits new guys for his company’s work crew, men he can vouch for, and who want to work, and fellow veterans if he can find them. “We can share some experiences, and it makes it easier; but if it wasn’t for those guys on the crew, I wouldn’t even talk about Iraq. I hardly think about it that much,” he said. “The Army was a chapter, but I’m not going to make it run my life.”

Ironically, a visible reminder of Iraq are the region’s sprawling “man-camps,” like the one near Williston, N.D., where the oil fields are a common destination of Mr. Marottek’s crew.
The camps help with the region’s housing problem. There are lots of jobs, but nowhere for workers to live, and no easy way to create an infrastructure. Mr. Marrotek said he was fortunate to have access to cheaper, hometown rent in Poplar for himself, his girlfriend, Carlee, and their two young girls. It’s often a two-hour commute to work sites, but in northeast Montana, he said, it’s about two hours to everywhere.

About the camps, with their neat lines of hundreds of trailers, complete with dining facilities, on-site recreation and strict rules forbidding alcohol and visitors, Mr. Marottek said, “they damn near look like a forward operating base.”

Nathan S. Webster embedded in Iraq several times as a freelance photojournalist. His book, “Can’t Give This War Away: Three Iraqi Summers of Change and Conflict” is available as an e-book on Amazon. Follow his blog at “Can’t Give This War Away” and on Twitter.

An earlier version of this post misidentified the location of the Montana town of Poplar. It is in the northeast, not northwest.

The military has taken its fair share of institutional blows lately, including scandals that have humbled generals and admirals, a rising suicide rate, embarrassing revelations about failures to prevent sexual assault (of both men and women), and, most recently, the trial of Pfc. Bradley Manning.

It seems that before there is time to make an organizational adjustment to one crisis, or even gauge the root of the problem, another emerges. The military is trying to respond, and some initiatives show promise, like a revamped course in Navy basic training that may be reducing episodes of sexual harassment. But I believe one cause of many of these problems is consistent: bullying or, as we call them in the military, “toxic” leaders. Many current and former junior officers, myself included, believe that a single institutional change could prevent many of the military’s crises: the speedy identification and dismissal of those weak leaders.

This idea has been floated before. In 2011, a study by the Center for Army Leadership put the number of toxic leaders in the Army at somewhere around one in five. Having spoken with veterans from all the armed services, and having spent seven years in the Army infantry myself, I can say that 20 percent might be a low estimate. In my view, the infantry too often indulges senior leaders who are bullying, homophobic, sexist or closed-minded micromanagers. The effect on the soldiers and sergeants under their command can be deplorable.

Pfc. Manning was in a sister infantry brigade to the one I served in during my second deployment. When one hears accounts of how the private, who has said that he is gay, was isolated and ostracized in his unit, one has to wonder: what role did bullying play in his decision to release a trove of classified documents to WikiLeaks? Pfc. Manning broke his oath and his word, and deserved to be punished, in my view. But if the military did a good job of identifying bullies and holding them accountable, might we have fewer people like him?

Here is some of the bullying I saw firsthand, or heard about from witnesses. An officer threw a hot cup of noodles at one of his subordinates while screaming at him because a slide deck was late. An officer castigated his soldiers for being ungrateful to the Army during a suicide stand-down, claiming that the soldiers were not working more than 20 hours a week, and that their families should be grateful for having any benefits. A sergeant in charge of his unit’s Islamic outreach program routinely described Afghans as “Haji” and expressed contempt for the Muslim religion. A sergeant described what could only be interpreted as serial rape in laudatory terms, while everyone – including myself – stood around laughing. These officers and sergeants – many of whom have since been promoted – had a very real, measurable effect on their units.

What happened to the effort to reduce poor leadership in the ranks? General Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has proposed a nonbinding peer review system that would help mentor officers indicated to be harmful for their units. Under the system, described as a “360 review,” certain subordinates would have a chance to rate superior officers. I believe we should expand on that idea by allowing all enlisted service members, noncommissioned officers and commissioned officers to evaluate their direct and next-higher superior.

The Pentagon could also build a database from records that could pinpoint problem units and leaders. Those records might include statistics for criminal behavior, sexual assault, bullying, inspector general complaints and Congressional inquiries. If those numbers could be established down to the company level, it would be possible to track leaders who presided over units with consistently serious discipline issues.

We are still at war, and the military has a lot on its plate right now. But the longer good officers and sergeants are forced to tolerate weak or abusive counterparts, the longer soldiers, Marines, sailors and airmen will suffer under their charge. I may have been a mediocre officer, but I had the terrific fortune to work for some truly exceptional leaders. Troops should not have to tolerate the opposite.

Adrian Bonenberger is a former Army infantry officer who did two combat tours in Afghanistan, most recently as a company commander for First Battalion, 87th Infantry, 10th Mountain Division, the battalion featured in The New York Times series “A Year at War.” He is attending the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and his memoir, “Afghan Post,” will be released later this year. Follow him on Twitter @AHBonenberger.

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At War is a reported blog from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and other conflicts in the post-9/11 era. The New York Times's award-winning team provides insight — and answers questions — about combatants on the faultlines, and civilians caught in the middle.

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